


(ars memoriae)

by Saathi1013



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Domesticity, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, F/M, Illya Kuryakin/Napoleon Solo/Gaby Teller implied, Other, POV Female Character, POV Third Person Limited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:08:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28081440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saathi1013/pseuds/Saathi1013
Summary: For the prompt:Gaby/Solo smut. So, I think it's probably fair to assume Napoleon has done some honeypot missions for the CIA. And after the UNCLE trio have known each other for a while, it comes out that when Napoleon was sent to retrieve Gaby, he'd had orders to seduce her, if she didn't initially cooperate. Obviously Gaby is a bit surprised, but she'd kind of suspected as much, and they're in a good place so after a minute she's okay with it.(with a dash of emotional h/c and domesticity)
Relationships: Napoleon Solo/Gaby Teller
Comments: 11
Kudos: 19
Collections: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Winter Holiday Gift Exchange 2020





	(ars memoriae)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [canardroublard](https://archiveofourown.org/users/canardroublard/gifts).



Gaby wakes in the morning, feeling wrung out. Her skull is splitting and her eyes feel raw, and she needs aspirin and water and to pee, with equal urgency. A quick trip to the bathroom solves all three, and when she emerges, she spies the clock.

 _Scheiße_ , it's late. She should be at headquarters by now.

Then she remembers Waverly sending her home early yesterday and telling her to take the rest of the week off. Her face burns, and her stomach somersaults, a thick mix of anger and shame and resentment curdling in her gut. Hot tears prick her eyes and she blinks them back furiously. She'd done enough crying yesterday.

She's also _hungry_. She remembers skipping dinner, which explains why the aftereffects of drinking has affected her so.

Well, that and it had been a _lot_ of liquor.

Gaby throws on a wrap and some pyjama pants and goes to search through her fridge.

What she finds instead is Napoleon, cooking casually at her range, crisp white shirt rolled to the elbows and his jacket carefully folded over one of her dining room chairs. His waistcoat is bottle-green today, with hints of blue, like the peacock he is.

She should be surprised to find him here, but he's like a cat: a locked door is just a suggestion to him. And, apparently, one that he's decided to ignore today.

"Shouldn't you be at work?" she asks anyway.

"If Waverly asks where I am, there are three girls from the steno pool who will swear they just saw me… in three different, distant corners of the building." He gives her a kind smile, and she balls up her fists. "Good morning to you, too."

He's being too nice. She wants to snap at him, but she doesn't have the energy, and besides, he's making pancakes, and she's too hungry to turn him out before they're done. Instead, she steals a piece of bacon from the pile that's draining on a paper towel and pours herself a cup of coffee from the stovetop percolator he'd gotten her as a housewarming present.

Illya had gotten her a knit throw, soft and lush and a cheerful tangerine, perfect for curling up under during chilly winter nights. It's not big enough for three - though the couch is, barely, provided they're not being too adventurous - but then, the three of them hadn't had their current arrangement at the time, either, so he can't be blamed for the oversight. Three on the couch makes things cozy enough, anyway.

Still, Illya will probably get her a bigger blanket the next time he gets the chance. Napoleon keeps threatening to get her a bigger _bed_ , and frankly, she doesn't know where she'll put it. Waverly's been generous enough, providing this flat for her. She can't imagine asking for another, just for the sake of a _bed_.

Gaby sits at the small table by the kitchen window, letting the coffee warm her fingers more than drinking it. She thinks about Waverly's generosity. She didn't deserve it yesterday, and she doesn't deserve Napoleon's today. She was _awful_ yesterday. She owes Waverly an apology. Agent Birch, too. He'd just been trying to be helpful.

She sighs, and Napoleon's at her side, sliding platters of pancakes and eggs and bacon in front of her, as neat as a waiter and as prompt as if he'd been summoned by her gloom. He brings over empty plates, cutlery, and a cup of coffee for himself before he settles across the table and tucks in, filling both their plates.

"Lemon poppyseed with blueberry syrup," Napoleon comments, returning her plate, piled high. "I seem to recall you liking them when I made them before."

She did. They'd been the best pancakes she's ever had, but she hadn't told him so outright. Her stomach rumbles and her hands reach for her fork and knife, but she pauses before she digs in. "You know what yesterday was, don't you." It's not a question.

He chews his bacon a bit before swallowing and answering. "I didn't. But I looked it up."

By which he probably means, 'I broke into Waverly's office and looked at your file.' She lets it pass. She'd have done the same, now that he's taught her to crack Waverly's safe.

Gaby nods. She's glad she doesn't have to explain what happened yesterday. She swallows the lump in her throat and starts eating.

They're _still_ the best pancakes she's ever had.

* * *

As if her willingness to have breakfast with him is an invitation, Napoleon chats throughout breakfast - about nothing, really. Office gossip, articles he's read, salacious hints about his checkered past, all interwoven into a comfortable familiarity as cozy as the blanket Illya had given her.

She doesn't even have to respond, but when he mentions that he's heard from an agent who'd recently taken a trip behind the Wall that her old car is still wedged between two buildings, she almost chokes on her coffee.

"It's _not_ ," she says.

"It _is_ ," he replies, eyes sparkling with mirth and a little bit of pride. "All the valuable parts have been stripped from it, but the chassis is still stuck there. Apparently a neighborhood cat had kittens there last April."

Gaby laughs for the first time in _days_. "...I still can't believe that worked."

"Of course it worked. Have I ever led you astray?"

She shoots him a dubious look.

Napoleon’s grin widens. "All right, have I ever led you astray _in the long run_?"

Gaby shakes her head and mops up the last syrup-laden crumbs of her pancakes. "What would you have done if Illya hadn't forced your hand?"

He considers this. "I had several contingencies."

"Naturally. But what was your _original_ plan?"

"Well. I doubt it would have worked, since I know now that you'd been recruited by Waverly… but I would have tried to convince you to come with me - I had forged checkpoint papers for you at a dead drop two blocks away. And if those had been compromised, I know about a tunnel under the wall… but that route would have been trickier and slower, so your souped-up little rocket was a better bet with Peril on our tail."

She tips her head, considering this. She knows there are tunnels - she'd heard the rumors before he's come to get her, but their exact locations were so fiercely guarded that the wrong person finding out about one was practically a death sentence… sometimes at the hands of German or Russian authorities trying to acquire the information by whatever means necessary, sometimes at the hands of those who guarded the tunnels.

Of course Napoleon knew about one. Waverly probably knows about all of them.

"I've never heard you admit you couldn't convince someone of something before," she comments.

"Your loyalty to Waverly back then was… remarkable." He doesn't mention her double-cross, during their first mission together. He doesn't have to.

He also doesn't mention the times she's disobeyed Waverly's orders for his sake - and Illya's - since then.

"What would you have done to convince me, if Waverly and Illya hadn't been factors?"

He shrugs. "Whatever I needed to. My orders were flexible as to methods, though not to results."

Gaby knows what that means. Her eyebrows lift. "You would have seduced me?"

"Not that it would have been a _hardship_ , Fraulein Schmidt." He smiles, a broad, knowing smile.

She reaches out, tangles her fingers with his. "I don't recall being all that receptive to you at first, Mister Important Suit."

He frowns thoughtfully. "A young woman like you, beautiful, talented, stifled behind the Wall and barely scraping by… I think I might've stood a chance." He brings her fingers up to his lips, grazes a kiss over her knuckles. "I would have played to your vanity."

"Oh?" She can't say she's particularly vain. She likes wearing the beautiful clothes her boys pick out for her, but she's just as happy in coveralls, up to her elbows in grease and engine parts, hair tied back in a kerchief. Clothes have _function_ , and beautiful ones are meant to draw the eye, make an impression to manipulate a mark, create a mask she can hide behind.

As if reading her mind, Napoleon shakes his head. "Not about your appearance. About your _skills_." He lets go of her hand, adopts a pose. "Fraulein Schmidt, I represent an investor who's aware of your involvement in the local street racing scene–" of _course_ he knows about that "–and who thinks you're the most promising driver in Eastern Europe." He gazes into her eyes earnestly. "Come with me, and I'll _personally_ guarantee that you get past the Wall safely to meet him."

She laughs, delighted. "All right, that might have worked."

"And if it hadn't, I would have taken you to dinner to discuss the matter further - 'anywhere you like, my employer is paying' - and opened up to you…"

She can imagine it easily. A proper dinner back then, rather than the cooking the meager offerings available in her pantry and eating alone… a handsome stranger wining and dining her, offering her the world and a _personal guarantee_ , would have chipped away at even her most-fortified defenses.

Hell, that's basically how Waverly had recruited her. But then, dashing as Waverly is, he's not Napoleon. She can imagine the girl she'd been falling for Napoleon in a way she hadn't fallen for Waverly.

She can also imagine how crushed she would've been when Napoleon's deception would have been revealed.

It's better they found each other the way they did, she decides. Despite everything. "Opened up to me? How much of that would have been true?"

He shrugs. "Some. Enough." He stands, gathers their plates, and brings them over to the sink. She picks at a last piece of bacon on the platter, watching him. He gets restless when he talks about his past, even though she's memorized most of his file, as he has hers, as they have Illya's and Illya has theirs.

But there's a wealth of information not covered by dry recitations of facts. Things like _why_ , and _how_ , and the feelings behind them.

Napoleon comes back to the table. "And when we were done with dinner, I'd tell you which hotel I was staying at, and that I was only in town for the week, but I'd leave word at the desk that you could come to me anytime, even if you just had questions, or wanted to talk…" He lifts her hand in his, again brushing her knuckles with her lips, but this time it's more careful, less familiar, more tentative. Like they’d just met. "I'd say, _you can come to me for anything_ , and I'd mean it." His eyes are intent and sincere, underscoring his words. He drops her hand. "And then I'd let you drive home."

That would have been clever, to bait the hook and walk away.

Gaby stands up, closing the distance between them. "And if I offered you a ride to your hotel?" She slips her fingers into the armholes of his vest, gentle, feeling the flex of his arms as he loops his arms around her waist.

His eyes spark. "I'd turn you down, saying it was a lovely night for a walk."

She feigns concern. "But mister Solo, it's not safe for an American at night on this side of the Wall. I insist."

"Far be it from me to turn down a lovely, _insistent_ lady."

Gaby laughs again, pulling him close, and he bends down to kiss her. Her hands slip up, up, over his shoulders, fingertips curling around his collar.

When they break apart, his blue eyes are dark and intent, all the warning she gets before he sweeps her into his arms, one catching her shoulders and the other looped under her knees. She shrieks with surprise, but doesn't tell him to let her down. She just works at the knot on his tie as he carries her to the bedroom.

He leaves the lights off, and she's grateful for it, though she doesn't pretend that he can't see the half-empty bottle by her bed, the tumbler on her nightstand. In the dim light, they're easier for her to ignore.

He lets her down next to the bed, kissing her again, and their hands busy themselves with each other's clothing. She isn't wearing much, so it's short work for him to strip her down to her underwear, but she's familiar with the layers he wraps himself up in, and they've done this often enough that she isn't as shy about the disparity as she might have been.

Though he _is_ distracting, broad hands wandering over her bare skin, smoothing into the small of her back, cupping a breast and rolling her nipple under his thumb, kissing along the line of her neck… She palms him through his trousers, feeling him half-hard already, just to even the score.

Gratifyingly, he groans low in his throat and tips her back against the bed, urgency spurring him to help her pull away the last of his clothing. She drags him down to her with clutching hands on the back of his shoulders and a knee hooked around his leg.

Their mouths meet and break and meet again. Her nails dig into his back when he angles his thigh against her mound, pressing against her just so. She grinds up, against his erection, and he sets his teeth against her collarbone. His lips burn a trail of heat over her chest, his tongue laves her nipple, and she tangles her fingers in his hair, disrupting his careful coif. He pulls her underwear off her legs, kisses her hip, and she gasps, "Yes, Napoleon, please–" until he presses his open mouth against her cunt and gets to work.

He's the first man who'd done this for her. She'd slept with Illya before him, of course, but it had been different with Illya at the beginning. They'd always been rushed, frenzied with each other with their history of interruptions and furtive with the suspicion that Waverly would frown on their fraternizing.

Napoleon had calmed them down, improbably. Gave them tacit permission to take their time, demonstrating through example.

"Of course Waverly already knows," he'd told them, once. "If he had a problem with it, he wouldn't have let it go this far. Besides, he's not going to break up his best team."

He'd had a point.

So, while Illya has no qualms about going down on her, Napoleon had been the first to do so, happy to take his time to reduce her to cinders, silver tongue and clever hands working between her legs like all his talk, all his ingenious theft, was secondary to this single skill.

He prides himself on being able to take people apart.

She comes twice this time, one light frisson of a climax rolling into a second, deeper one that has her biting back a shout, before he lets her catch her breath. When he climbs up to lie beside her, he looks so flushed and tousled and smug that she'd smack him if he hadn't earned it.

Gaby wipes his face with the corner of the sheet and kisses him instead. He lets her push him back, sit astride him, kissing slower now, though she can feel his own need in how he touches her, in the heat of his erection at her backside.

She clasps his wrists with her hands and pushes his arms up, away, pressing him against the mattress, and he trembles beneath her.

He's different with Illya. Always goading, pushing, pulling. It's how they are, in bed and out of it. He doesn't _yield_ for Illya the way he does for her. Even when Illya pins him, Napoleon is getting what he wants.

He leaves his hands where she puts them, even when she lets him go, reaches for the bedside table, rolls the condom down. His hips rock up, into her grip, and she squeezes the base of him.

" _Gaby_ ," he gasps. A warning that she heeds, guiding him to her without any teasing, taking him in, letting him fill her up with one smooth roll of her hips.

This won't take long, for either of them. She's primed and he's ready, so she sets a brisk pace, rocking atop him with her hands braced on the mattress above his shoulders. "Touch me," she tells him, and he surprises her by first tangling his fingers in the hair at the back of her head and drawing her down for another kiss. It's messy with the motion of their bodies, but the stroke of his tongue along the sensitive inner skin of her lower lip sends a thrill down her spine.

He shifts, thrusting up as she rocks down, and the new angle is good, better than good. She drops her head to pant against his neck.

"Yes," she tells him, and, "yes, yes, good, please" and she doesn't remember if he knows the language she's speaking, but he gets her meaning anyway, slips one hand between them to rub where she's hottest, slick and perfect and—

She falls apart again around him, atop him, feeling him let go a moment later, groaning her name, his voice raw and broken as she shudders through the aftershocks.

It takes a minute to catch her breath, for her limbs to respond, before she can roll off him and curl to one side, her back to the wall. He gets up, disposes of the rubber, comes back, and wraps her up in his arms, pulling the duvet over them both.

This was something they both had to learn from Illya: sharing warmth. Not leaving.

Gaby always feels fragile, after. Exposed, vulnerable, raw. She'd always used to slip away after her lovers had gone to sleep, sometimes just as far as the small couch in her old flat, tending the fire in the stove or drinking until she felt her skin settle back into place. If she'd been at someone else's place, she'd find an excuse to leave. Or she'd slip out after they fell asleep.

How it is for Napoleon, she doesn't know. He still doesn't like anyone blocking the door, though, so she or Illya take turns in the middle. Leaving him an exit.

"Thank you for coming over," she murmurs, quietly against his shoulder, face half-hidden under the blanket.

She feels him nod, press a kiss against her temple. "I'm just filling in for Peril," he says lightly, and she lets the lie stand. Illya would have come over as soon as he could. He wouldn't have made her hangover breakfast and distracted her.

Gaby takes a deep breath, lets it out carefully. "He taught me how to fix cars," she admits.

"Walther Schmidt? I thought he might have."

"We didn't have money for ballet, so he took me to the shop where he worked. He thought I should be- useful? No, that I should have a skill. Some way to earn money, when I was older." He had been kind, thoughtful. Not physically affectionate, but he praised her easily enough whenever she figured out something new.

"I'll bet you were a spitfire, back then." She can hear the smile in Napoleon's voice. "He probably needed something to keep you out of trouble."

She pinches Napoleon, on the closest skin she can find, on the inside of his arm, smiling despite herself. "He taught me not to take shit from too-clever scoundrels, too."

Napoleon laughs. "And to put the fear of God into unsuspecting motor pool agents?"

Gaby's face burns. "He put the wrong fuel in my car," she mumbles. It had been damaged in a chase; she's been rebuilding it for months. Working on it reminds her of all the time she spent in Walther's garage.

"Well, he won't do _that_ again." Napoleon stokes a gentle hand down her back.

"I'll apologize on Monday." Gaby sighs. "Maybe bring him something."

"I'll show you how to bake scones," Napoleon promises. It probably won't go well; she's all thumbs in the kitchen. He yawns, chest expanding under her palms. "Later."

She nods, feeling drowsy herself. Illya is due back this afternoon. Maybe he'll come by, slip in and find them like this, curled together like kittens. It's a nice thought.

She tucks herself closer to Napoleon's warmth, and lets herself drift to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Dear Canardroublard: I didn't *quite* nail the roleplay as requested, but there's a nod to it in there. And I liked the idea of Gaby-centric h/c between her and Napoleon, too, from your second prompt, so I added a touch of that, too. I hope this suits your hopes. It was a lot of fun, to focus on these two in the trio, thank you for the great prompts!


End file.
